South Africans have a high adventure quotient. People rappel off Table Mountain and dive to see shipwrecks and sharks, they surf and kayak among pods of whales migrating from Antarctica.

They swim in the gelid and turbulent Table Bay, or race 56 kilometres by foot between the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

A week before this, Michael covered a riot that deteriorated into full-on urban warfare.

That I was psyching Lewis and him out just by sitting there was strangely emboldening.

I had to go, or face the cost ­– never mind the humiliation – of calling in a rescue.

“Lewis,” I ask, “what happens if you jump and miss?”

“Todd,” he says, “you can’t plan for success and failure in the same moment.”

Yet, jumping did indeed require two apparent opposites: control your body but surrender to the circumstances.

“On five!” Lewis shouted. “Four! Three!–”

I looked below, inhaled twice, and leapt. I felt my viscera rising as the rest of me fell, as if the laws of gravity were, for an eternal moment, suspended just for my abdominal organs.

I draw my heels together and my hands to my sides to enter the pool vertically, not smack the surface.

The water is so cold it is like having my flesh brushed with refrigerated paint. To add further pain to my glory, I have to swim over one hundred metres in this icy water surrounded by sheer rock walls, with nothing to hold onto.

I don’t know how many jumps we do, but they become less fearsome as jumping became more familiar, and the hypothermic water becomes less shocking, if not less wearying.

As we continue on, somehow we take some wrong turns… hours pass, but our only wristwatch has stopped working so we don’t know how many.

Eventually we come upon a field of huge stones bleached white by streams of sunlight ­– a rare sight to see at other areas of the gorge. We empty our soaked rucksacks, and lay like lizards on the warm boulders.

After snacking on biltong, we begin walking again, glad to be dry. As we venture lower, the gorge’s walls, terraced by crusty Table Mountain sandstone and landscaped by gnarled trees emerging at an angle, grow higher.

And then we are faced by a startling sight: The Big One, the five-storey jump. By now there is no more ceremony, and in any case, still no choice; this is, we realise, only the halfway point.

We throw down our rucksacks, hearing them clap on the water, and find a flat, solid place to launch…